Someone Just Explained Why Berghain Is the Best Club in the World

‘In the era of fake news and big data for corporations, there’s an obvious antidote: getting actual data for yourself.

So, it’s a given that too many words have been spilt over Berlin’s Berghain. But in trying to portray the club’s hype or mystique, I notice that there’s not often much discussion of its consistency. And to understand how techno and in a broader sense electronic music and the various fashions about it are projected into the world, understanding that consistency is key. If a club is repeatedly pushing out long queues every Saturday and Sunday night (yes, Sunday), and if that is having the influence that Berghain does on bookings elsewhere, on musical aesthetics, and even on how people dress, then part of what you’re actually describing is consistency. These are all measures of repetition.

So, what are the actual numbers? Musician and developer Olle Holmberg aka Moon Wheelis a geek and coder as well as a musician. So, curiosity evidently led him to write a JavaScript app to crawl Berghain’s Website – from late 2009 to present.

This isn’t revealing any secrets in the club. Quite the contrary: it’s taking public-facing information, and separating the reality from people’s perception.

Now, I’m not one to just say “hey, let’s post a story on Berghain to see if it works as clickbait.” I actually find the results interesting. One thing that particularly struck me about Berghain regulars was their tendency to swoon “oh my God, the lineup this weekend is amazing” – then go on to describe the residents playing on the program.

More analysis will require more work, but we can at least pull up the artists who play most often (and they do so by such a large margin that even minor bugs in the crawling/scripting won’t make so much difference).

The top 25 listings in the Berghain program (from end of 2009, with some minor glitches possible as the program is crawled as plain text):

Major disclaimer: this is incomplete data. The opening years of the club are missing. Artists wanting to share their anniversary dates or more complete data or stories, of course, you’re welcome to.

Second major disclaimer: This is listing data, not booking data. Ostgut has more accurate information, in that they’ll have information on who actually played (for instance, when someone jumps in, which happens a lot), unlisted guests, and the liking.

Third major disclaimer: Because of those issues, in fact, the ranking above is almost certainly incorrect, though the names that appear are still the correct names. (nd_baumecker most likely played more than Boris, for instance.)

There’s still some information, though – if it’s not a totally complete snapshot, it’s still a big snapshot. Olle tells CDM that at least one or two people who have seen the numbers have already expressed interest in doing analysis on gender and measures of diversity.

I can at least eyeball these 25. In case you’re wondering, five out of those top twenty five are female, so we’re far from any gender parity even in one of the world’s more progressive big venues. (20% is well above the going average, though, and it’s relevant that women are part of what define Berghain’s sound via these residencies.) The top of the list is also overwhelmingly white, although it’s also fairly German. (That says something about residents versus guests, of course – and about who is settling into Berlin for the long term. It’s not exclusively German. Dinky is from Santiago, Chile. DVS1 was born in Leningrad, USSR, but grew up in the USA. Boris cut his teeth in the scene with none other than Larry Levan in New York’s Paradise Garage.)

They’re also all there for a reason. The reason for the German representation is also a story about how the music scene in the country has grown up since the 90s, with many of these residents having made their mark in the labels and parties that helped define the scene since the fall of the Wall, whether Sammy Dee and the Perlon label or Ben Klock and Marcel Dettmann and the homegrown Ostgut label. These artists are German, but they tend to come from smaller towns in both east and west parts of the country.

So if there’s nothing surprising here, what is here is a metric of what is successfully unsurprising. (That also applies to the value many of these names have in booking. See also the Ostgut booking operation, who hilariously warn that they won’t offer table reservations. That’s hilarious because I’m sure someone is regularly writing and asking. I wonder where people imagine the tables are.)

If you scroll through the raw data, you’ll see more of the untold story of Berghain as the larger complex of event spaces and programs. As the Website publishes not only the club’s best-known too floors, Panorama and the titular Berghain, but also Laboratory, Halle am Berghain, and Kantine am Berghain (the former canteen of the power station), including various special events, you’ll get all sorts of names. (Mine even pops up a couple of times through those weird loopholes, without even me having involved North Korean hackers.) In recent weeks, that also includes a more leftfield program at the club’s new Säule space.

But there’s a deeper message, and it’s one about consistency and repetition. Part of what allows us to get your attention in the press is to try to pass off something as new. But behind the scenes, the other thing that press, bookers, publicists, clubs are all doing is actually about priming you to see certain ideas and certain people as important. And that’s in fact about repetition – reinforcing name recognition and making ideas.

So there’s something to that Sunday ritual. For better or for worse, if you look at the top names here, these are really the foundation of this Berghain effect.

This is, of course, just one club, even if a vital one. I think while numbers don’t tell a whole story, it’s great to have some actual data and do some real research. (And the data can be thought of as a first step, not a last.) So I hope, as with female:pressure‘s analysis of gender on festival lineups, we continue to gather data and use more than just our own limited perception to understand music scenes.

Based on those stats, Boris was again the winner – then having played his 101st set.
Marcel Dettmann: 84.
Ben Klock: 80.
Prosumer: 77.
Cassy: 73.

Those numbers also tel you the missing first years are really significant. (If I read them correctly, it also means Berghain is less about the resident frequency than it once was, which would make some sense. But without the actual data set, that’s just a guess..’